Attention–or con­cen­tra­tion– and mem­o­ry are two crit­i­cal men­tal skills and are direct­ly relat­ed. In fact, many mem­o­ry com­plaints have noth­ing to do with the actu­al abil­i­ty to remem­ber things. They come from a fail­ure to focus prop­er­ly on the task at hand.

Take the exam­ple of not remem­ber­ing where you parked your car after shop­ping at the mall… It is like­ly that you did not pay much atten­tion to where you parked the car in the first place, thus leav­ing your brain with few oppor­tu­ni­ties to reg­is­ter any infor­ma­tion that could be recalled lat­er to help you find your car. The same rea­son­ing goes for not remem­ber­ing where we put our glass­es!

Many of our actions are per­formed auto­mat­i­cal­ly. By oppo­si­tion, focus­ing atten­tion is effort­ful. As you know, with age the brain needs more time to process infor­ma­tion. Along with speed of pro­cess­ing, oth­er brain func­tions decline. A cru­cial one is the abil­i­ty to focus and ignore dis­trac­tion.

As we age it thus get hard­er and hard­er to pay atten­tion. But focus­ing our atten­tion on the task at hand is key for bet­ter mem­o­ry per­for­mance. What can we do then to improve con­cen­tra­tion and mem­o­ry?

Focus on the task at hand: If talk­ing with some­one: ask ques­tions; if read­ing a book or a report: ask your­self how you would sum­ma­rize what you just read to a friend or to your boss.

In gen­er­al, avoid and/or elim­i­nate dis­trac­tions. Tune out every­thing else. The hard­er the task, the more impor­tant it is to tune out dis­trac­tions.

Do not try to dou­ble-task, this will increase your errors and divide your atten­tion. Atten­tion is lim­it­ed. When you try to do sev­er­al things at once, you nec­es­sar­i­ly have to divide your atten­tion and thus con­cen­trate less on each indi­vid­ual tasks.

Use med­i­ta­tion. Sev­er­al stud­ies have shown that med­i­ta­tion can be a good brain train­ing tool that affects espe­cial­ly atten­tion­al / con­cen­tra­tion skills.

How to improve mem­o­ry

Pay atten­tion and con­cen­trate! (see above)

Relate to the infor­ma­tion you are learn­ing. The more per­son­al the infor­ma­tion becomes, the eas­i­er it is to remem­ber it. Ask your­self how it makes you feel. Ask your­self where else you have heard this. Ask your­self whether there is some­thing in your per­son­al life relat­ed to this piece of infor­ma­tion.

Repeat the infor­ma­tion: Come back to it more than one time. This has been found in tons of stud­ies: repeat­ed infor­ma­tion is eas­i­er to recall. Spaced retrieval (a method with which a per­son is cued to recall a piece of infor­ma­tion at dif­fer­ent inter­vals) is one of the rare meth­ods that show some results with Alzheimer’s patients.

Elab­o­rate on the infor­ma­tion: think about it. Things that are con­crete and have a clear mean­ing are eas­i­er to remem­ber than abstract and vague ones. Try­ing to attach mean­ing to the infor­ma­tion you are try­ing to mem­o­rize will make it eas­i­er to recall lat­er. Your brain will have more cues to look for. For instance, try to pic­ture the infor­ma­tion in your head. Pic­tures are much eas­i­er to mem­o­rize than words. To remem­ber fig­ures and per­cent­ages it is much eas­i­er to pic­ture these in a graph for instance. Relate the infor­ma­tion to some­thing you know already.

Thanks for the tips. I’m look­ing for spe­cif­ic exer­cis­es that I can do to improve con­cen­tra­tion and mem­o­ry. I am going to try mem­o­riz­ing por­tions of scrip­ture. That has helped in the past a lot. Also, have you heard any­thing about clap­ping one’s hands to a metronome to improve con­cen­tra­tion? I heard about it once, but am not sure of the specifics. Thanks!
–David

I think being focused and atten­tive is some­thing thats required, but we’re not nec­es­sar­i­ly taught. Its impor­tant to try to watch your thoughts and sus­tain your thoughts for as long as need­ed. I’ve found that med­i­ta­tion and a good diet works well in order to aid focus and over­all cog­ni­tive func­tion­ing. Hope this helps.

I blog on mem­o­ry reseasrch (thankyoubrain.blogspot.com) and I ran across papers that show peo­ple are more dis­tractible as they age. Most old­er peo­ple (I am one) have to work hard­er to pay atten­tion.

Thanky­ou.
All makes sense being an old­er stu­dent myself (47) :0 . this will help me retake my 3rd year under grad­u­ate stud­ies again with a bet­ter under­stand­ing and more con­fi­dence, improv­ing con­cen­tra­tion.

I found that study­ing some­thing on 2 dif­fer­ent days (1 day between them to study some oth­er sub­ject) helped a lot in all my under­grad and grad­u­ate stud­ies, as long as I stud­ied seri­ous­ly both times. Inter­leav­ing the study days this way worked for me even as an old­er stu­dent (Ph.D., enginer­ing). No dis­trac­tions, of course!

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